Backyard Orchard News

UC Cooperative Extension advisor Richard Molinar, whose career has been focused on helping small family farmers succeed, retired in June from what he calls his “dream job.”

As a young community college teacher in his native Bakersfield, Molinar first learned about the mission and role of UC Cooperative Extension in the agricultural industry. He immediately knew what he wanted to do with his life and never let go of his dream.

Molinar had earned a bachelor’s degree in crop science at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and then volunteered in rural Honduras with the Peace Corps for two years helping farmers improve practices and techniques.

“This had a huge impact on my life,” Molinar said. “That’s when it all started. I loved helping people.”

He returned to the United States and, after a stint with a chemical company, began teaching classes in crop science, soils, vegetable crops, beekeeping and organic gardening at Bakersfield Community College. With advice from UC Cooperative Extension colleagues, he set his sights on a career as a farm advisor.

Molinar returned to school for a master’s degree while working for a weed abatement firm in Bakersfield. He never tired of his UCCE job search and in 1986 was selected to be the environmental horticulture advisor for UC Cooperative Extension in Alameda County. Nine years later he transferred to Fresno County.

“This has been a job I have thoroughly enjoyed,” Molinar said. “I’ve been able to work out in the field, directly with farmers and live in Reedley, the ‘fruit capital of the world.”

Throughout his tenure in Fresno, a large fraction of his time and efforts were devoted to helping the county’s 1,300 Southeast Asian refugee farmers, a job that was facilitated with the language and culture skills of his assistant Michael Yang, an immigrant himself from Laos.

Molinar has accumulated a litany of awards during this 27-year UCCE career for “meritorious service,” “distinguished service,” “lifetime achievement,” “IPM innovator,” and “leadership,” but the honor he most cherishes, he said, was being presented a Hmong name by the Hmong Farmers of Fresno in 2011.

Molinar’s Hmong name is Vam Meej, which means “giving prosperity.”

Among Molinar’s first goals in working with Southeast Asian farmers was teaching them modern production practices that hadn’t been used in their homelands, such as pest control using integrated pest management techniques. IPM involves nurturing beneficial insects.

“When we introduced good bugs and bad bugs, they all laughed at us,” Molinar said. “They thought all bugs were bad. We’ve been teaching about this concept for years now and we’re not laughed at any more.”

Molinar has helped Southeast Asian farmers navigate rules and regulations established by government agencies, such as the San Joaquin Valley Air Quality District and the California Department of Occupational Health and Safety Administration.

For example, Molinar and Yang helped farmer Zia Thea Xiong, a Southeast Asian immigrant and father of 12, when Cal OSHA issued a $750 citation for insufficient toilet facilities. Molinar and Yang took pictures at the farm and accompanied Xiong to Sacramento to appeal Xiong’s citation, which was reversed.

“We’ve helped farmers comply with workers’ compensation insurance, the injury and illness prevention training plan, and acquiring the 16 or so different posters they have to display,” Molinar said.

He also worked with Southeast Asian farmers to open new markets for their produce, taking them on market tours in San Francisco and Los Angeles. More recently, he has been collaborating with other agencies to pave the way for placing Southeast Asian farmer-grown vegetables into upscale markets like Whole Foods.

In recent years, food safety has been an increasingly important arena for extension activities with small-scale producers. In this case, the farmers do not have to cope with government regulation, but with retail and wholesale fruit and vegetable outlets that require growers to provide written food safety plans. With the director of the small farm program, Molinar developed a template the farmers can use to write a comprehensive plan by simply filling in information specific to their operations.

Molinar has maintained a one-acre demonstration and research plot at the UC Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center since 1995, where he conducted cherry tomato and mini watermelon variety trials, research projects comparing irrigation techniques, and experiments involving integrated pest management of weeds, insects and vegetable diseases. Crops that were grown for demonstration or research purposes over the years were nopales (cactus pads), capers, jujube trees, a wide variety of Southeast Asian vegetables and 50 kinds of Hmong medicinal herbs. The herbs, many which had not been documented as having been grown in California before, were submitted to the UC Herbarium at UC Davis to be pressed, dried and archived.

In the early 2000s, the Molinar and Yang transitioned the one-acre research and demonstration plot to organic production. Molinar also worked with the Kearney research advisory committee to set aside 10 acres at the center for larger organic studies.

Molinar has reached out to Hispanic and African American and organic small scale farmers in Fresno. Every other year he teamed up with Manuel Jimenez, UCCE advisor in Tulare County, to offer a “Conferencia para agricultores,” a conference on agricultural production conducted entirely in Spanish. He gave presentations at the Fresno farm of Will Scott, a leader in the African-American Farmers of California.

Though he retires June 30, with emeritus status, he said, he will continue to serve the family farmers who have been his clientele in Fresno County. He is also interested in taking up some small-scale farming himself. An Allis Chalmers garden tractor is already parked in the Molinar backyard and he is negotiating with landowners to secure a half-acre to one-acre site where he can grow food to be direct marketed to people in the Reedley community.

Manuel Jimenez went from hard-scrabble farmworker to world-renowned farming authority, all while living in and serving his hometown – the small, rural community of Woodlake, Calif. The University of California Cooperative Extension advisor, who worked with small family farmers in Tulare County for 33 years, retired in June.

Jimenez has a storied California heritage. His grandmother was half Chumash Indian; his father an immigrant from Zacatecas, Mexico. The extended family of farmworkers settled in Exeter, where his grandfather, an early labor organizer, planned a strike in the 1950s, long before Cesar Chavez came on the scene. Subsequent hard feelings forced the family to migrate to other areas for work.

“My family was entrenched in farm labor,” Jimenez said. “I had the good fortune to go to college.”

Completing college wasn’t easy. He married his wife Olga right out of high school, and they immediately started a family. Jimenez worked in the fields and Olga in a packing house while they scrambled to find childcare.

Ultimately Jimenez earned a bachelor’s degree in plant sciences at Fresno State University in 1977. Not long after graduation, he was named senior agronomist for the North American Farmers Cooperative, an organization of 300 small-scale vegetable and fruit producers based in Fresno.

“We were responsible for visiting all the farmers twice annually – 600 farm calls a year,” Jimenez said. “I was overwhelmed very quickly, but learned a lot.”

While working for the cooperative, he met Pedro Ilic, then a UC Cooperative Extension advisor in Fresno County, who encouraged him to apply for a new small farm advisor position in Tulare County.

“I was hired in 1980 and have been here ever since,” Jimenez said.

Jimenez was able to make his first mark on the industry by experimenting with a novel pest control strategy for tomato pin worm on cherry tomatoes, the most valuable crop produced on small-scale farms at the time. Growers were making 15 to 20 pesticide applications per season, and the pest developed resistance to the chemical. The heavy pesticide use also killed beneficial insects that keep leaf miner in check. The result was completely defoliated plants that produced nothing.

Working with UCCE specialists at UC Riverside and UC Davis and other UCCE advisors, Jimenez conducted research proving that dispensing a non-toxic insect pheromone was an effective and economical alternative to chemical treatment.

“This research really paid off because it worked on all tomato types,” Jimenez said.

With this success, Jimenez became established as a valuable resource for the agricultural industry and had opportunities to share the research in statewide and international presentations. His primary goal, however, was sharing agricultural advancements with the small-scale growers in Tulare County. He surveyed the clientele, most of whom were Latino, and found they were unlikely to read newsletters or magazine articles to learn about agricultural technology. But they did listen to the radio.

Jimenez established a relationship with Fresno-based KGST “La Mexicana,” one of the oldest radio stations in California, and developed an agriculturally themed morning radio program in Spanish. Later he regularly appeared on a question and answer program, Entrevistas y comentarios, with host Estela Romo. The collaboration lasted 30 years, until Romo retired.

“It was a great way to reach small growers,” Jimenez said. “On the morning show, we gave them market news every week, and then we went into education on agricultural issues we felt were important – food safety, fertility, pest management.”

A difficult time in his career came during the recession of the 1980s when many small-scale producers lost their farms. The number of small farms in Tulare County dropped from 400 to 70.

“It was heart wrenching,” Jimenez said. “Small growers were so deeply in debt, when the tomato industry crashed, they lost their livelihood and way of life.”

Jimenez came to realize that market forces, more than anything else, influenced the success or failure of small farms. He began to look at new market opportunities for profitable small-scale production, and saw blueberries. New Southern highbush varieties were becoming available, and, with technology to acidify the valley’s alkaline soil, he expected it to be fairly easy to grow the healthful and valuable fruit.

In 1998, Jimenez established variety trials at the UC Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center. Each year, the planting attracts hundreds of people to the field station for the annual Blueberry Day. New varieties have been added over the years and new production practices researched. In 2012, Jimenez grafted the most common commercial blueberry varieties on the roots of farkleberry plants (Vaccinium arboreum). Farkelberry is a small, stiff-branched evergreen bush that is more tolerant of alkaline soils than blueberries.

The plants are growing well, Jimenez said. The coming years will reveal whether using this technique will improve the economic viability of California blueberry production.

Jimenez’ service to the people in his community is not limited to his work on the job. In 1993, Jimenez and his wife Olga founded Woodlake Pride, a volunteer organization that puts youth to work in innovative beautification projects throughout the community. The program aims to channel the young people’s time and energy into constructive endeavors and keep them out of trouble and street gangs. In time, Woodlake Pride created the 14-acre Bravo Lake Botanical Garden, the first agricultural botanical garden in California.

Jimenez is now working with the City of Woodlake to secure a grant to improve the safety, infrastructure and esthetics of the garden. If the $1 million grant is approved, new restrooms, drinking fountains, and fences will be added to the community park.

For his work both on the job and in Woodlake, Jimenez has received numerous awards. Among them was the first-ever Tom Haller award at the California Farm Conference in 2008. Jimenez was named the 2000 Citizen of the Year in Woodlake. He was one of three recipients of the California Peace Prize in 2011.

After working continuously since he was a youngster, Jimenez is looking forward to traveling around the state of California when he retires.

“I was born here, but I haven’t seen a lot of it. I’ve been too busy working,” Jimenez said.

However, he won’t shirk either his professional or volunteer service. Jimenez plans to work with potential blueberry research successors to maintain the research plot at Kearney, and he is considering invitations from overseas’ companies to share his agronomic and community building expertise to a still wider audience.

Not long after Scott Johnson joined the UC Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center academic staff in the early 1980s, he began working with a brand new giant underground weighing lysimeter, an instrument that would become the signature tool of his career. Johnson retired June 30.

For more than a quarter century, Johnson conducted experiments with peach trees growing in the lysimeter, which allowed him to calculate precisely how much water evaporates from the soil and transpires from the tree on an hour-by-hour basis. Results of this research helped growers properly manage their irrigation strategies to improve fruit quality and yield.

A native of Utah, Johnson earned a bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Utah. He earned a Ph.D. at Cornell in 1982 and that year moved his family to the San Joaquin Valley to begin a 31-year stint as UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Pomology at UC Davis, based at the Kearney facility in Parlier, Calif.

Using the lysimeter, Johnson discovered that some common fruit tree irrigation strategies being used in the San Joaquin Valley were significantly impacting fruit quality and yield.

“We found that growers should not cut back on water after harvest, if they can help it,” Johnson said. “Anytime we cut back on water applications, we developed some sort of problem – diseases, sunburn, mites and fruit disorders in the subsequent crops, like doubling and deep sutures.”

Despite the importance of the irrigation research, Johnson had perhaps his greatest impact on growers’ practices from his research on nitrogen fertilization. Many growers, he said, were over fertilizing their stone fruit orchards.

“We did a survey and found the average rate of nitrogen fertilization was 150 pounds per acre,” Johnson said.

However, much of that fertilizer stimulated vegetative growth, which shaded the fruit and prevented the desired reddening; and required more pruning in the winter, labor that added to the expense of growing fruit. In addition, the high fertilizer rates caused more problems with fruit quality, insect pests and diseases.

“I started working on this right at the beginning and harped on this same thing my whole career,” Johnson said. “Today, farmers are using about a half or a third of the fertilizer they did decades ago.”

Johnson also worked on understanding fruit trees’ need for other nutrients, such as zinc and calcium.

“It was pretty common for growers to apply zinc every year,” Johnson said. “From research we conducted at Kearney, we learned that orchards don’t need zinc every year. We also compared materials and found the cheapest zinc products work just as well as expensive ones. We’ve saved growers a lot of money with these results.”

Over the years, Johnson contributed to 70 peer-reviewed journal articles. He was an active contributor to the International Horticulture Society’s meeting proceedings, titled Acta Horticulturae, having authored or co-authored 30 articles.

Johnson worked closely with his colleagues Ted DeJong, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis, and Kevin Day, UCCE farm advisor in Tulare County, on these and many other orchard research topics, including rootstocks, pruning, training systems, thinning, girdling, irrigation and fertilization. In 2011, Johnson took a sabbatical leave to organize and aggregate all the research findings on a comprehensive website called The Fruit Report.

“Everything is there on the website for growers establishing and managing fresh market peach, plum and nectarine orchards,” Johnson said.

Johnson has already sold his home in California and has moved back to Utah, where two of his children have settled with their families. The Johnsons will volunteer, travel, garden and, in a year, embark on a humanitarian mission with their church. Johnson has been honored with emeritus status and, though will be living out of the area, has plans to continue work on orchard fertilization management.

“There’s a great deal of interest today in reducing the potential for nitrogen to percolate down to the groundwater,” Johnson said. “You can get some nitrogen into a peach tree by spraying it on the leaves. It doesn’t get to the soil so there is less of a possibility of groundwater contamination. There may be some interest in this idea in the future, particularly in areas where the soil is very sandy or the orchard is near a stream.”

Though Johnson said he had some misgivings about working off campus when he first took the job with the University of California, he leaves with no regrets.

“I loved working at Kearney,” Johnson said. “To me, it turned out to be the ideal job.”

When the University of California decided to provide geospatial support to its scientists at the UC Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center in 2000, they tapped Kris Lynn-Patterson, an experienced teacher and information systems technologist, to lay the groundwork. Geographic information systems academic coordinator Lynn-Patterson retired in June.

Lynn-Patterson earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geography/climatology at Fresno State University and taught weather, climate landforms and global information systems classes there as a full-time lecturer for five years and part-time at State Center Community College for 10 years.

In 1990, while still teaching part time, she took a new position as a climatologist with a crop insurance firm.

“We were embarking on a brand-new initiative in the crop insurance business using remote sensing and spatial imagery to appraise losses from weather events,” Lynn-Patterson said.

In 2000, she again broke ground by introducing geospatial technologies to agricultural research at Kearney. Geospatial technologies now allow scientists to take a broader view of landscapes than is possible from the field level.

For example, Lynn-Patterson worked with Pete Goodell, UC Cooperative Extension advisor with the Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program, to understand the migration of lygus bugs through the San Joaquin Valley’s mosaic of diverse crops. In the spring, lygus can reproduce in lush vegetation on foothills surrounding the San Joaquin Valley. As the plants dry when the weather warms and rain stops, the lygus begin looking for a new home in valley agriculture, including cotton, which suffers severe economic losses from lygus.

By combining observations made on the ground with GIS mapping technology, Goodell was able to determine the areas in the San Joaquin Valley where cotton is most likely to have lygus problems in mid-summer. Where alfalfa is scarce, cotton fields absorb the migrating bugs. But where alfalfa is close to cotton fields, the alfalfa acts as a lygus sponge and spares cotton most of the damage.

Recently, Lynn-Patterson and her staff, in collaboration with the Citrus Pest and Disease Prevention Program, have been engaged in mapping cropping patterns in the Central Valley citrus belt. This geographic database will provide information needed to ensure quick action when Asian citrus psyllids or huanglongbing disease is found.

Last year, the Kearney GIS program became part of a larger UC Agriculture and Natural Resources statewide program called Informatics and Geographic Information Systems. IGIS is organizing and preparing data pertaining to agriculture and natural ecosystems statewide and making the information accessible on the web.

Lynn-Patterson has a full retirement planned. She is establishing a non-profit animal rescue organization, “Four Feet Inn,” that will connect homeless dogs, horses and other animals with foster families.

“My goal is to find a path to get animals off the street and into no-kill shelters,” Lynn-Patterson said. “I love animals and I love people who want to help animals, so facilitating this connection is what my spirit wants to do.”

Lynn-Patterson is also pursuing a writing career. She has already completed the first novel in a trilogy and begun work on the second. Both of these hobbies she plans to combine via the Internet with travels around the United States and Canada in a motor home.